1. Preludes -- Late-stone age foragers -- Of pots, fields, and flocks -- Proto-Njila speakers and their society -- The dissemination of the Njila languages and its consequences -- Metallurgy -- Toward the formation of West Central Africa -- 2. Early village societies, 700-1000 -- Divuyu -- Agriculture -- Bovine cattle -- Overarching institutions : corporate matrilineages and dispersed matriclans -- Becoming food producers -- 3. Of water, cattle, and kings -- Nqoma -- Cattle nomads and their societies -- Agropastoralists -- Networks -- History, environment, and collective imagination -- 4. Of courts and titleholders -- Feti : an Angolan Zimbabwe? -- Principalities on the planalto -- An inner African frontier
Summary
Like stars, societies are born, and this story deals with such a birth. It asks a fundamental and compelling question: how did societies first coalesce from the small foraging communities that had roamed in West Central Africa for many thousands of years?
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 285-309) and index
